On a beautiful stretch of coastline near San Luis Obispo sits Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear power plant.

Advocacy groups have been campaigning to close the plant since it opened in 1985, and it seemed their goals would finally be realized as California pushed for a future powered by renewables.

An intense heat wave in 2020 stressed the energy grid, prompting a rethink of how nuclear power fits into our energy future.

[music] Earth Focus is made possible in part by a grant from the Orange County Community Foundation.

[music] For many Californians, PG&E's decision to close Diablo in 2016 seemed like the final nail in the coffin for nuclear power in the state.

For groups like Mothers for Peace, the pending closure was the realization of their life's work.

There are so many reasons to oppose Diablo.

As long as we're alive, we'll be opposing nuclear power.

The decommissioning also marked new beginnings for others close to Diablo.

For Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, the announcement spurred them to organize a movement to save the plant.

We founded Mothers for Nuclear and we marched to save Diablo Canyon.

For the YTT Northern Chumash Tribe, it created an opportunity to purchase their ancestral lands around the plant in a groundbreaking land-back deal.

It's only right that after all of this time, now that this opportunity is present, that this land be returned to us.

While most assumed the plant would close, few predicted how climate change would throw a wrench into the equation.

In 2020, climate change hit California's energy grid in a big way.

Fires downed transmission lines, low water levels threatened hydropower production, and high temperatures saw air conditioning skyrocket.

As a result, the state's energy grid was pushed to the max.

It got so bad, state authorities urged Californians to drastically reduce their energy use in the face of rolling blackouts.

It became clear that California's goal of having 100% clean energy by 2045 was not happening as fast as it needed to.

In order to hit that goal, the state would need to triple its renewable energy sources, a feat that could take decades.

Facing this reality, Governor Newsom and others began to look at Diablo Canyon with new eyes.

Instead of seeing the plant as a barrier to a renewable energy future, they now saw the plant as a key tool for getting us there.

In 2022, the governor proposed loaning PG&E the money to continue operating.

The measure was approved in late 2023, ensuring Diablo would stay open until 2030, at least.

For local advocacy group, Mothers for Peace, who've been fighting to close Diablo for decades, the decision caught them by surprise.

Why don't we look at this?

Oh, yes.

This is some of our scrapbooks.

-Yes.

-So cute.

Amazing.

It was 1969 when I got initiated into that world of activism.

Our focus was the anti-Vietnam war.

We were also environmentalists, so we were witnessing the huge oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, which is very close to us.

Meanwhile, we were learning more about radioactive fallout because weapons testing was happening at the Nevada test site, and we were aware of the health effects that this radioactive fallout was causing there.

This meager knowledge that we had about radioactive fallout is what led us to opposing nuclear power.

Our two strongest legal arguments were that we didn't have a workable emergency plan.

The even bigger one was the seismic risk.

In 1969, oil geologists had discovered what they named the Hosgri Earthquake Fault, which is 3.5 miles from the Diablo Canyon site.

PG&E seemed to not know about this for some reason.

I guess they didn't read the oil industry's journals or something, but it was published.

Later when PG&E was backed into a corner, they had to admit, "Oh, look at that.

There is a fault there."

Further studies showed that it is an active fault.

Now that word does not come from Mothers for Peace.

That's from the United States Geological Survey.

In fact, to this very day, our biggest objection to relicensing the Diablo plant is seismic.

Let's look at this one from '84.

Oh yes, that was a very significant year.

Because they were just about to switch the plant on, and you try the legal methods.

That's what Mothers for Peace was doing and still is doing.

Exactly.

The Abalone Alliance took a different route, including leafleting, vigils, walks, civil disobedience, all nonviolent.

You participated in that civil disobedience.

I did.

In '84, the Abalone Alliance called for vigils, protests, an encampment, all sorts of stuff.

A lot of us want to do an action at the gates of Diablo as families and how we can most effectively say to the NRC that we as people who live here in this community don't want Diablo to open because we really believe that it's very unsafe for us.

I'm sure all of you have seen the poster that says, "What you do in case of a nuclear accident.

Kiss your children goodbye."

Excuse me while I cry a moment.

[chuckles] I don't like the thought of kissing my children goodbye.

When the plant finally did open in '84, we were very distressed.

I wouldn't say we felt defeated, but we felt scared.

We had to figure out different strategies.

We have failed at preventing it from opening, so we had to start figuring out ways to get it to shut down.

Basically, that's what we've been doing ever since.

In California, for the time I've been here about the last 25 years or so, the public opinion about nuclear power was never positive.

It was always tending toward a view of nuclear power as dangerous.

There's been a long-standing program of really organized, attempting to close the two power plants at the Public Utility Commission through the legislature, to make it more difficult, more expensive, harder for the utilities to continue to operate these plants.

It took a certain amount of courage, if you will, for governors to turn around on Diablo Canyon.

When Governor Newsom proposed that Diablo Canyon should continue to operate, we were totally shocked.

We thought we had it in the bag.

PG&E had signed, sealed, and delivered, and its own language said, "The energy from this plant is too expensive, and it will not be needed after these current licenses expire."

Everything was on board for a smooth transition away from nuclear power, and then it all got totally obliterated.

Many people locally and nationwide accept nuclear power because Diablo has been running it for 40 years, and it hasn't had a major disaster, so they think, "Oh, okay, it'll be fine."

I understand the concept of low probability, high consequence events.

It's not acceptable to me.

I think it's extremely important that every community that hosts a nuclear power plant needs a movement to push back because it will lessen the chances of that disaster happening if the utility feels more held to account.

We are experiencing fires, the likes of which we haven't seen in many, many years, that has impacted not just the state of California, but the entire west coast of the United States.

The reframing of the nuclear discussion really began after the wildfires 2017.

The utility industry recognized that the climate crisis had really begun producing significantly destructive events.

That was highlighted by the 2018 Fire in Paradise, all triggered by equipment belonging to Pacific Gas and Electric.

California was wrestling with a number of things.

It had already banned new nuclear.

It was trying to get rid of fossil fuel generation and focus on clean energy resources.

You had the loss of the San Onofre Nuclear Plant, and at the same time, you needed enough generation to support the demands that California had.

A state with an enormous population, a huge use of power, and a change in focus with how you supplied all of those consumers.

Now the climate crisis is forcing us to put everything on the table.

What do we need to do to eliminate carbon from our energy system and keep the lights on?

To some, that means, well, let's give nuclear another look.

The decision to extend Diablo's license was vindication for Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, who work at the plant and founded Mothers for Nuclear.

All right.

[laughs] Oh, wow.

Now we're really going slow.

Are you excited to plan the swing?

Yes.

Who's going to do the tire swing, girls?

I'm going to do it.

Are you going to do it on top of the t.. [laughter] You kicked me in the face.

[laughter] Oh, boy.

That's heavier [laughter] So much more dangerous than nuclear power.

So much more dangerous?

[laughter] I met Heather Hoff many years ago when we had young kids and we were doing environmental service projects together.

Then in 2015, we heard that Diablo Canyon was under threat of premature closure.

I was worried about that because it had taken me such a long time to change my mind from being suspicious about the place to then just believing that it aligned with my environmental values.

Because our personal reason for founding Mothers for Nuclear was from an environmental perspective, for land conservation, and for climate reasons.

We tend to be a little hippie liberal leaning [chuckles] environmentalists.

There weren't a whole lot of people like us working in nuclear, so we decided that we had a special voice, a special perspective that we wanted to share with the world.

We went to a gathering of employees and other people who cared, and we heard really more about the threat.

After that meeting, we were the last ones in the room.

We knew we had to do something about it.

We didn't know what yet, so we just started organizing people.

We organized an event at a local brewery.

We had a little silent auction, and we were going to organize a march from San Francisco to Sacramento to tell lawmakers that we needed to keep Diablo Canyon open.

We made all of our own signs and at the end, we showed up at the California State Lands Commission meeting in Sacramento, and we all spoke about what we cared about and we only grew from there.

When Heather and I started Mothers for Nuclear, we were saying something that the company that employed us was not saying, which was, we should keep existing nuclear power plants open.

We knew that public opinion has to change in order to bring about support for policies and politics that support nuclear, and that will then get us to more clean energy.

Nuclear energy is such a powerful hope for me because it's a way that we can power our planet while still protecting our environment from climate change.

I think nuclear is going to be our savior, it's going to be the way that we address climate change, the way that we decarbonize our electricity supply, and the way that we do it with the least impact on our planet.

Climate change is used as part of the argument for all sorts of things.

It's an argument for renewable energy, but a whole set of people are using it as an argument for nuclear energy.

People who came to see this as climate change is so important that the dangers of nuclear power were being overvalued, and its positive attributes in the fight against climate change were undervalued.

They like to present themselves as people who were following the science, not fearmongers.

How well nuclear energy contributes to the battle against climate change requires grappling with California's complex energy system.

California gets its energy from a variety of sources, like much of the country, it's primarily natural gas.

It's about 49% natural gas.

Nuclear makes up about 9% Solar now is about 20% Then you have wind, hydro, and geothermal, which make up about another 20% We also receive power from Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and even as far as Wyoming.

It's about 1#3 of California's supply.

You're depending on the states around you to help keep the lights on.

Even amongst the climate scientists I talk to regularly, there is a split on can renewables along provide all of the energy needs so that we can go to a low-carbon or zero-carbon energy setup for the United States.

There are times when wind and solar will provide more than 100% of the power that a community needs, but solar and wind don't happen all the time.

Solar power produces electricity when the sun shines.

At night, it doesn't produce and the wind doesn't always blow.

There are storage methods you can use, it's just they're nowhere near large or plentiful enough to have right now renewable power provide all of the United States power.

We haven't built enough storage in large part, because all of these issues focus on economics.

Our system when it comes to energy is based on a utility company that has a rate base that they draw from to build stuff.

The transformer hanging on a light pole to the power plant, and they rely on their ratepayers to cover those costs.

That makes it difficult because we see rates now rising at a pace all across the country, particularly as we go through the energy transition.

The question is, what is going to fill the gap between what solar and wind can produce, the need for storage, and the move to get rid of fossil fuels?

The debate over Diablo is also being carefully watched by the YTT Northern Chumash.

Diablo Canyon sits on their ancestral homeland.

Prior to the decommissioning reversal, the tribe was working with PG&E to purchase the land around the plant.

Good afternoon everyone.

I'm very glad you're here.

I'm Suzanne Hassan with PG&E and this is my colleague Carina .. On behalf of PG&E, we're really excited to have you come with us on this tour this afternoon.

On behalf of the yak tityu tityu yak tilh#n# Northern Chumash Tribe, we appreciate you taking a day out of your weekend, both of you to escort us onto our wonderful homelands.

Really happy to do it.

We appreciate it.

We'll go out and we'll take a look.

[music] The Diablo Canyon Power plant sits on a parcel of about 500 to 600 acres, but the industrial footprint is much smaller, and that is our ancestral homeland with a documented ancestry taking us directly to the village sites that were on Diablo lands.

It's a place where my grandmother's grandmothers have been buried for thousands of years, and it is a place that we're trying to reclaim.

We were removed from Diablo Lands violently and without compensation, without agreement, and now we're at a point in time where we're trying to get Diablo Lands back.

The dream of land back, the opportunity of actually gaining our homeland really came to the surface based on the time that I was appointed on the Diablo Canyon decommissioning panel because during that time on the panel, we discovered that PG&E were planning on liquidating the excess property around the plant.

Any public utility in California, anything they do with their land or whatever, they have to get authorization or approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.

We were quite surprised when the CPUC decided to work on what they call a Tribal Land Transfer Policy.

Essentially, what it means is that if you're a public utility company and you have surplus land that you want to liquidate, you have to give first right of offer to the local tribe.

That, of course, made us real excited because there might be an opportunity to actually acquire this land back.

It's uneven terrain here, so everybody, watch your step.

Yes, we can go down there.

-You want to lead the way?

-Yes, I'll lead the way, sure.

I'll lead the way.

We can go all the way down.

Ooh, look at the water down there.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

We needed friends and allies, and so we looked for the very best that we could.

We talked with the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County, and they were on board immediately to help us regain ownership.

We recognized early on that this is a significant and complicated project.

There's a power plant in the middle of these lands, [chuckles] and they're beautiful lands with pristine coastline along the state of California which is not all that common anymore.

We really knew there was power in all of our groups coming together to both address the economic vitality of our community, how we would actually conserve the lands, what would be that durable thing that would ensure the lands would never be developed, no matter who owned them, and how do we return them to the tribe.

The way that it's set up is that the tribe would own the land.

We, as a land trust, would hold the conservation easement to ensure it's protected forever and Cal Poly would help with research, economic vitality, and innovation pieces and how that ties with the plant site, Parcel P as we call it, and REACH also being involved in all of that.

There's different roles for each of us to play.

The beauty of this plan is that to have a tribal entity, to have a state agency, Cal Poly, to have a conservation agency, which land conservancy has a beautiful history in this area of land conservation, and it's local.

That's the other part that is so great.

To come up with a proposal that we did, that we're all so proud of and so excited about because it works on so many levels, I have great faith in it.

Oh, so pretty, huh?

It's beautiful.

I love it on a foggy day or a rainy day or a sunny day or a windy .. We'll have plenty to do.

I'm looking forward to it.

In 2021, the partnership actually submitted a proposal to PG&E to buy all the land, 12,000 acres.

We were feeling really good at the time because the plant was going to be decommissioned, we had viable partners, and we actually met with PG&E reps several times to talk about our proposal.

Then our governor, probably rightfully so, because of the need of power, had a change in direction.

Of course, PG&E at that time said, "Since there's an unknown whether or not the plant will go forward, we're going to have to put our discussions on hold until we see what happens."

We said, "No, okay, we're just going to change our strategy instead of a land-back strategy under decommissioning, it's now a land-back strategy under continued operation.

It didn't matter to us one way or the other.

When you really take a look at the plant site, it is an industrial site that will probably have some type of power connection.

I can see the plant operation of some sort to continue on that location with an overall land back.

We would see that as another economic opportunity because hopefully whoever may own the plant, maybe there's an arrangement that we can receive a fee of some sort for land for use, kind of a coexistence, if you will, of land conservation and the power plant going forward.

Assuming our plan comes to fruition and we protect the 12,000 acres, ultimately PG&E will still be responsible for the nuclear waste.

They'll still maintain security and public safety.

It really is a win-win for them as well.

They really have shown openness and willingness to help make conservation happen.

One, two, three, eyes, on me.

Siata.

Siata.

-Al right, there you go.

-Thank you.

While Diablo Canyon will continue running until 2030, its long-term future is still to be determined.

The question isn't just about how nuclear fits into our energy mix.

It's also about balancing our energy needs while conserving California's precious landscapes.

Something that I care a lot about and I grew up caring a lot about was land conservation.

I wanted to do something in my life that preserved wild spaces for people.

After a while working in Nuclear, I just thought, this is it.

This is how I can preserve land for my children.

If we in society can produce energy on a small land footprint, we can save wild spaces for our kids to enjoy.

We can do it all.

We can give land back, we can have innovation partnerships with Cal Poly and our community.

We can do all these things right now and keep running the plant.

It's very understandable that the younger generation are worried about climate change and the future of the planet.

Mothers for Peace is with them totally, but we know that nuclear is not the answer.

Do you want to trade carbon for radioactive waste?

I don't.

We have to deal with our carbon problem without dumping radioactive waste on the earth.

When the plant is decommissioned I think it should go to the original inhabitants of this land, the yak tityu tityu.

They've suffered way too much already and I think it should be left to them to decide how to use it.

It's not just about healing, but it's also about moving forward together.

The 30 by 30 biodiversity initiative as put forth by Governor Newsom is that 30% of the waters, 30% of the land is conserved by 2030.

That's for all of us.

This would be a huge chunk to help get that started.

For the last 30, 40 years, the land really has been pretty protected.

There's been a great advantage to have the plant there as it relates to cultural issues.

This 12,000 acres and 14 miles as coast land, Mother Nature's been able to do its thing to even a point to inherited this power plant and worked it into the system where now it's an asset.

It's a manmade asset but it's something that probably we should not just destroy without fully utilizing that asset.

In California, it is political reality that public opinion is against nuclear power.

I don't think California public opinion is long-term going to say, "Oh yes, let's build a whole bunch more nuclear power plants."

There are nuclear power plants that are in reasonably decent shape that as part of the near-term fight in the United States against climate change could be left running.

I think that the next 20 or 30 years will be the time when California needs to have the debate about nuclear power and that enormously valuable, beautiful ecologically useful part of the California coast.

What is its best and highest use?

[music] Earth Focus is made possible in part by a grant from the Orange County Community Foundation.